Construction startup Wify, on Wednesday said it has secured $2 million (Rs 15.6 crore) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Blume Founders Fund and Unitus Ventures, with participation from existing investor HePo NL and Singularity Ventures.
Founded in 2019 by Vikram Sharma and Deepanshu Goel, Wify is a full-stack tech platform for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) post-purchase home furnishing services.
The Mumbai-based startup, operated by Installco Wify Technology Pvt. Ltd, will use the fresh funds to strengthen its technology and invest in skilling its blue-collar workers.
The company claims to currently serve more than 100 brands in the home improvement sector including the likes of IKEA, Livspace, Homelane, Hettich and Amazon across 60 cities.
“India is yet to become a DIY (do-it-yourself) market. Unlike in the West, consumers here rely on brands for various on-site services such as pre-purchase measurements, installation and other services post-purchase. Wify is built to bridge this gap by providing a full stack tech-enabled platform for brands to meet customer expectations throughout the product life cycle,” said co-founder Sharma.
Bengaluru-based early-stage venture capital firm Blume Ventures was founded in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath. The firm has backed more than 100 startups including TaxiForSure (acquired by Ola) and ZipDial (bought by Twitter). Meanwhile, Unitus Ventures, launched in 2012, is a venture fund that supports early-stage fintech, healthcare, and jobtech startups with India scale and global potential.
“Wify has solidified its position in the after-sale services market through its unique offering, powered by technology. The company today is a trusted partner of 100+ leading brands operating in the home improvement segment,” said Karthik Reddy, partner, Blume Founders Fund.
“There is a $20 billion worth of demand for companies that are catering to brands and consumers for post-purchase services. This demand and opportunity is only expected to grow further, boosted by the penetration of e-commerce and international brands in India,” said Surya Mantha, managing partner, Unitus Ventures.
Zipteams
Mumbai-based conversational platform Zipteams Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised seed funding of $700,000, in a round led by IndiaQuotient.
The startup will deploy the fresh proceeds to scale its engineering and machine learning teams, product development and expand footprints across India and the US.
Zipteams, founded in 2021 by Siddhartha Srivastava and Akash Chatterjee, enables sales and customer teams with intelligent meeting rooms to have engaging customer conversations and store those in one place. The company also plans to expand its use cases for sales and customer success teams across other sectors as well.
“With the seed funding, we will strengthen our product and also expand our geographical footprint across India and US. IQ’s involvement will help us to fast-forward some of the most critical projects, which otherwise would’ve taken time to manifest,” said Srivastava.
“We have only seen the tip of the iceberg for ‘India to rest of the world’ SaaS opportunities and IndiaQuotient will continue to back founders building in this space. Inside sales is a growing market in itself and real-time contextual intelligence will be a significant enhancement in sales conversions and digitising the sales playbook,” said Anand Lunia, founding partner, IndiaQuotient.
India Quotient, a paper stage investor, has backed startups like ShareChat, Sugar Cosmetics, and PagarBook. It typically gives out the first cheque for a startup backing them with funds in the range of $250,000-1.25 million.
Strive
Striveon Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates Web3 platform Strive, on Wednesday said it has raised $500,000 as a part of its pre-seed funding from 100X.VC, Lets Venture, GrowX Ventures, Amey Mashelkar (Head at Jiogennext), Saurabh Agarwal (Founder at Zebpay) and YPO, among others.
Founded in 2021 by Kartik Mehrotra and Swathi Perumala, Strive offers product for retail investors in the crypto market. The company aims to give the bottom 95% of crypto holders and Web3 users access to high-quality non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are typically accessible to the top 5% of wealth holders.
"Our goal is to provide access to high-quality NFTs such as Bayc that have traditionally been out of reach for most people in this space. We believe fractionalizing these NFTs can make them more accessible and democratize this space,” said Mehrotra.
“Strive’s marketplace will help increase the liquidity of NFTs and make it easier for people to buy and sell NFTs in the broader market with an additional focus on risk diversification, faster ROI, and higher buying conviction,” said Ninad Karpe, partner, 100X.VC.
Interality
RealityX Pte Ltd, which runs virtual world building startup, Interality, on Wednesday said it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed capital from Maninder Gulati (global chief strategy officer, OYO); Jaynti Kanani (co-founder and CEO at Polygon); Alvin Tse (CEO of Xiaomi India) Sam Shergill (ex-CEO and founder of Sony India) and Adept Ventures, among others.
The Bengaluru-based startup plans to use the fresh capital to strengthen its product and design verticals as well as hire global talent.
Founded in 2021 by Farheen Ahmad and Malav Shah, Interality is a platform where creators, communities and brands can launch their own virtual worlds and create and monetize in-world content, products and experiences.
“AR/VR is foundational and transformative for building the next generation of content, commerce and culture in the Metaverse and we’re building the go-to platform where these would preside at. The funds will help us to develop cutting edge products to power the next phase of our growth and achieve the product-market fit,” said Ahmad.
SportVot
Dravstream Technologies Pvt Ltd, which operates sportstech startup SportVot, has raised undisclosed seed funding led by Ankur capital, with participation from Capital A, SucSEED Indovation Fund, and Marwah Sports.
The Mumbai-based firm will use the fresh capital to scale its product and technology.
Founded in 2019 by Siddhant Agarwal, Shubhangi Gupta and Yash Bhagwatkar, SportVot is a sports platform where one can watch local match live streams, highlights and emerging athletes of India.
“We look to expand into new geographies across the country and bring access to live video capture to as many sports games as possible. We are extremely delighted to have our new investors on board and I look forward to working together with them as we discover the next generation of sports talent across the country,” said Agarwal.
“Sportvot enables young sports persons to showcase their talent and be discovered, leading to penetration of sports into the masses and making India a leading sports nation,” said Rema Subramanian, Managing Partner Ankur Capital.
